When DuBois was doing the majority of his work, it was during a period where literally almost everyone believed in race as a biological fact. Very few people were going against this notion, such as Franz Boas, who literally invented the notion of cultural relativism and it did not catch on wide spread until well after the war, in part thanks to the work by Boas students, like Margaret Meade. DuBois was very much a man interested in racial uplift and built his understanding of pan-African liberation ON his ideas about racial uplift. I suspect he had a more nuanced view of what race actually was by the end of his life, but he was a man of his times.
It was an evolution of understanding of race AS we were building our knowledge of DNA. We think differently now about race, in part because we have a better understanding of DNA that we did not have 100 years ago. The social science and history were changed by our understanding of human genetics.
The current discussion is about the wording of § 3 (3): No person shall be favoured or disfavoured because of sex, parentage, race, language, homeland and origin, faith or religious or political opinions. No person shall be disfavoured because of disability.
I’m oversimplifying and probably being quite condescending here, but the origin of the discussion is basically that Rasse is a word so loaded with bad connotations that it makes us cringe every time we come across it. So maybe replace it with something that accurately conveys the intentions of § 3 (3) but, you know, somehow nicer?
I can thoroughly sympathise with this position - National Socialism has left behind so many things it had appropriated that are soiled now, and there is always the question of do we try to clean it up?, scrap it because it’s beyond repair?, or do we just ignore it? - but in this case I think it’s meant well but misses the point.
Race is a social construct without any basis in biology (or anything else), but that doesn’t make it any less real. It is a concept that shouldn’t even exist, but it does. It is real enough to kill people, and it won’t go away by ignoring it or renaming it.
It’s still a valid discussion (I think), because it makes people think about a thing or two that needs to be thought about more often.
The actual truth, though, is that you’ve misunderstood the word. Irregardless isn’t based on the prefix at all, it’s a portmanteau of regardless with irrespective. Not my favorite way to generate words either because it makes them confusing, but not the mistake you think it is.
Not that double negatives are actually wrong in English either; they’ve been used for emphasis for a very long time, however they might seem to logicians. And there’s the problem with prescriptivism. English never came down to us with a full rule book in place. You have to take some aspects of how people use it and deem them the acceptable ones, and others and deem them not.
And, unfortunately, deciding which are which is arbitrary at best; as the_borderer said it tends to be classist or racist at worst. You mistaking the nature of irregardless is a trivial case, it’s a redundant word we can do without. But how do you know you won’t trip over something more important the same way?
Sorry, no time for a full reply, but this might be interesting to give some background.
Basically, what @FGD135 says - no legal definition of race in German laws, to the best of my knowledge (IANAL!), but legal commentary on this exists (legal commentary is part of the interpretation of law and often used in court. Also, reminder: written law works differently than common law. Different philosophy behind it.)
Haven’t checked what Google Translate will do to it (might try later):
That remains to be seen. Several representatives of PoC who are PoC themselves have added their voices to the discussion, and as far as I am aware they were in favour of a change. One suggestion I remember was ‘ethnic background’ (ethnische Zugehörigkeit, slightly but probably significant difference in the German term).
Kinda straying from the main topic, but this baffles me. I feel like at least one of us must be confused about what prescriptivism means.
I don’t see any reason that a descriptivist dictionary wouldn’t have all of that information you list, and then some. Things like parts-of-speech information is literally a [cough] description of how a word fits into its native grammar after all. In fact, some of that stuff doesn’t even make any sense in a prescriptive sense at all. (I’m mystified as to how prescriptivist etymology would even work, for example.)
That’s on top of the fact that, at least on the Anglophone side of things, I’m not sure you could readily find a prescriptivist dictionary if you wanted to. Not any of the modern, mainstream ones, certainly.
Linguists - that is, the people who usually make the dictionaries - have more or less universally abandoned prescriptivism. Among other problems, it’s just an intrinsically a-scientific approach that’s incompatible with any real study of how language or words work. (Ironically, to the extent that prescriptivist philosophy lives on, it’s in a sort of non-standard ‘vulgar’ way – a zombie idea kept alive in actual usage mainly by pedants and scolds.)
I think there is one place where prescriptivism is justified – if in fact it is prescriptivism in this case – and that’s when the meaning of a word is in the process of changing, and widespread adoption of the new meaning would impoverish the language. E.g., the increasing use of “disinterested” as a mere elegant variation of “uninterested” rather than to mean “having no dog in the fight”.
But at some point you have to accept the battle as lost. “Meticulous” now means “painstaking”, and no amount of wishing or complaining is going to restore its previous meaning of “fearfully fussing over details”. Which is a shame, because I can’t think of another word that concisely expresses that, but there you go.
Well, for what it’s worth, even descriptivist dictionaries are still dictionaries. Anybody who actual bothers going to a dictionary is still going to find the prevalent definition, whatever that is at the moment. When words change, the battle is usually lost out on the streets, as it were, long before the new meaning reaches a sufficient threshold to make it into the next edition of your favorite dictionary.
Indeed, just the fact of having dictionaries at all is a little prescriptive, in the sense that it probably slows down and damps out some change that might otherwise occur. People who do go to a descriptive dictionary are still going to read what they find there as “this is how this word should be used”, and not as an invitation to use it as they please. The difference with descriptivism is just that it eventually becomes a two-way conversation, when new meanings do nevertheless take on momentum, rather than just a passing down of edicts from on-high.
